Huff Post, the internet’s most homogeneous enclave of “opinion,” whose thought police, thought judges, and thought jury overlords hand down verdicts for those of us NORMAL enough to watch nostalgic Christmas specials on TV, announced felt compelled to label the classic Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas special “problematic” last week.

Really? Problematic? Now, I’ve worked for a few big corporations in my time, and their HR Department’s favorite thing to do is tweak words and flip verb tense to make new and different meanings. Something (read: someone) isn’t just a problem, requiring a solution, something is “problematic.” Salient points in a discussion become “take-aways.” A raise becomes a “merit adjustment.” Justifications for not giving someone a raise are “constructive criticism.” Thinly veiled insults become “feedback.” (Note: feedback, by definition, is the horrifically painful-to-hear jarring noise of a microphone doing its impression of a battery being run up and down a cheese grater through the loudest speaker possible. But but but, “here’s some feedback! To help your growth!” Uhhh, no thanks, sadist. Have a really awesome day though!)

Words have meaning. Yes, I know my fellow Trump supporters have known this for some time. And we can tell that the thought police (a very small group of people who are incredibly loud, who are by no means the majority) are now saying “problematic” instead of “offensive.” If I came over to your house and you fed me a meal and I criticized your cooking, thatwould be rude. Impolite. Offensive. Mean! “Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer” is none of those things. Not even remotely.

And here is the best part: the more these mentally ill people attack obviously fun, spirited, joyful, happy moral stories, good vs evil fables, if you will, the more they alienate the masses. Even the left-leaning Democrat masses. For example, I consider myself to have mostly libertarian views with a few exceptions (yes, I was a Bernie supporter before I flipped to Trump) but I have long agreed that calling gay men the f word or black people the n word or women the c word is offensive. Mean. Rude! And most of my conservative friends agree! They — we — aren’t out using those words (that have meanings!) in the HR or leftist fashion, in ways that don’t make sense, to twist their meanings and use the words to control the speech and thought patterns of others. A woman I met at a women’s college once told me that her calling me a c–t is a compliment: that we have to usurp the patriarchy’s power to oppress women by taking the power of that word back, and by using it in empowering ways. I said, wrong. Whether a woman or a man calls me the c word, I am going to walk away from them and avoid seeing them ever again. She wanted to argue. Guess what I did. I cut her off. I literally said to her, “I don’t give my consent to be called a c—.” Yep, I used her consent language! (lol) And I saw a flicker in her eyes — for a just a split second, there was brief awareness that her reasoning was far from logical.

The more these mentally ill people attack obviously fun, spirited, joyful, happy moral stories — good vs evil fables — the more they alienate the masses.

Coincidentally, the very first clip Huff Post “exposes” in their anti-Christmas propaganda is Rudolph being bullied by the other reindeer. They call him horrible names. You know what he says? “Stop calling me names.” That in and of itself is incredibly brave. Most of us probably witnessed bullying at school on the playground as kids. The person being bullied just sits there and waits till it’s over. Teachers might intervene. They might not. Never did I observe anyone who was being bullied say — courageously — “Stop bullying me.” What a great movie for kids to watch: Rudolph protests the injustice as it’s happening to him. Nip it in the bud. Stand up for yourself. Stand up for those weaker than you. That’s what my parents taught me. And the message in the Christmas special gets even better!

Now, the wackjobs on Twitter want to call Rudolph’s dad saying, “There are more important things than comfort: self-respect” verbal abuse. Nope. We should all be so lucky as to have a strong father figure growing up who teaches us that temporary discomfort is worth it if it leads to an accomplishment we can be proud of down the line.

Yes, the basketball coach leading the gang-up on Rudolph is shitty and horrible. And we all knew a bad guy like that as kids. Stories like these teach us about the nature of good and evil. That sometimes evil is an adult who abuses power over kids. It’s usually NOT a horned devil. Kids need to know this. Show your kids this excellent TV special/parable today! Spoiler alert: Rudolph is vindicated in the end. And what does that teach kids? That there are good adults in a position of power as well, generous kind benevolent adults (Santa). That children have a choice regarding which path they’ll go down as they grow up.

Ok, Huffpost, you’re right: it’s mean that the dad of Clarice (the pretty girl reindeer that Rudolph likes) says he wouldn’t allow any daughter of his to be seen with a red-nosed reindeer. People are mean. Parents can be too. The whole point of the show is to teach kids that in the end, good leaders (Santa) identify what it is that each member of the tribe has to contribute to the overall happiness of the family/tribe.

And the young elf who wants to be a dentist who is berated for not wanting to be one, by his dad? Again, the lesson is that Santa (the good guy/alpha tribal leader in this context) sees that even if your whole family has been making toys for generations, you might be better off being the first dentist and helping the other members of the tribe in a way that more fully expresses your talents. Huff Post ridiculously analyzes this wonderful tale of love, acceptance and victory over bullies through a lens of PC purgatory. The note they insidiously end on? As Santa is flying though the sky to deliver toys, Rudolph proudly leading the entire herd, what suggestion do they implant in the viewer’s mind?

“Deviation from the norm will be punished unless it is exploitable.”

Give me a break. A literal break.

Deviant behavior and traits can and should be punished. But Rudolph isn’t a deviant. His nose isn’t a deviation. It’s not a flaw. It’s a gift. Santa is the strong leader who recognizes strengths. Guess what, Huff Post? Exploiting strengths is awesome. Otherwise, the strength the elf had, the skill of cavity filling, would have been lost in a sea of toy-making. Rudolph’s brilliant nose would have been wasted if he’d been forced to cover it up.

Words matter. Exploiting people — forcing them into unpaid labor — is bad. Exploiting strengths, valuing them, and rewarding the person who uses them in constructive ways, is good! If Huff Post weren’t so full of actual feces, they would be talking about how Rudolph covering his red nose with a fake brown prosthetic so it looks brown could be seen as a metaphor for the niqab or burka which force a woman to veil her strengths and hide her very existence to the point of near invisibility, and this propaganda outlet could instead spark a discussion of how some religions value women only for their reproductive organs.

But they don’t. Because the point of this video is not reallyto expose anything sinister. Huff Post’s goal isn’t to shine the light of truth onto any darkness (Santa does that!). Huff Post’s goal is to fill people who watch their micro documentary with hate. To fill people who watch it with hate for those who looooooove Christmas. Trump supporters.

What Huff Post wants the most is to normalize hate. But especially to hate anything that promotes happiness and national unity. Remember when everyone loved holiday specials no matter what their political background was? These fun TV specials that air this time of year were loved by everyone. They’re fun! Hilarious sometimes. My Jewish friend in grade school watched them with her family! Christians don’t have a monopoly on Santa. It’s a fun character! You’ll find out soon enough that it’s your parents. But that too is fun because then you know that you get to grow up one day and “be Santa” for your kids!

The good news is that Huff Post and their cronies are losing the culture war. People are sick of this B.S. They just want to focus on their families and have money and a good job. They don’t want to talk politics! The more Santa — who is obviously a “good guy” — is villainized in this absurd (almost laughable) way, the more the entire overt operation to mainstream hate and normalize tension between family members and polarization between the two political parties, backfires.

And they are such a hate-filled tiny percentage of the population, screaming into a hate-filled echo chamber, that they have no idea. So let’s not tell them to put down their shovels. Let’s celebrate family, tradition, and the spirit of giving that inspires us to be generous and creative all December long!

This is the manifestation of my #WalkAway moment and there was more than a little cognitive dissonance as I found myself cavorting around Capitol Hill with a big pile of “sorry we missed you!” flyers for Republican candidate Michael Bekesha, of Ward 6, who is running for DC council.

You see, while I’ve never been a democrat, per se, I have almost always voted for dems, including Congresswoman Betty McCollum, Senator Al Franken, among others, and a guy you may have heard of, Barack Obama — twice!

Six years ago — literally six years ago to the day (a beautiful fall day in zip code 55105), I was canvassing for President Obama to be re-elected for his second term, going door to door in St Paul, MN. I was terrified — and despairing — that Romney could win and the Affordable Care Act would be repealed. I didn’t LIKE Obamacare, I liked one of its provisions, that any state could set up its own single payer option (and like every failed attempt at something decent and beneficial of Obama’s legacy, that too became an impossible dream that even Vermont (Vermont!!) couldn’t realize); additionally, I was worried that abortion would instantly become illegal, overnight. I believed that Romney as a devout Mormon would make sure of that.

I had neither of these fears with Trump. Not for a second, not for a millisecond.

You know why? Because by 2016, I’d given up on the absurd ridiculous bureaucratic nightmare that ACA devolved into, one that doubled my own insurance premiums so I couldn’t afford health insurance (to say nothing of the deductible I’d have to pay if I DID need to see an ACTUAL doctor) and forced me to pay HUNDREDS of dollars against my tax refund due to the individual mandate since I opted to go uninsured rather than pay for something I couldn’t afford anyway. And frankly, I don’t think Trump would ever touch the abortion issue with an executive order. He talks a pro-life talk to get the religious demographic to vote for him, but he’s no Pence.

There is only one person I wouldn’t vote for in a race against Pence and that is Hillary Clinton. Otherwise, I would vote against Pence.

I don’t sound very republican, do I? Well, it’s because I’m not. I hate labels, and have long eschewed them. There’s a reason I call myself a progressive patriot. I’m pro-legal abortion (I wouldn’t object to a 120-days-pregnant cut off), I’m for gay marriage (what do you think men who can’t marry other men because society shames them for being gay do? Sometimes they marry women. Some might perpetrate fraud against women and pretend they’re straight). At the same time, I want very secure borders, an America First domestic and foreign policy, where we fix NAFTA (Trump is working on it with the new USMCA) and pull out of the TPP (Trump did that on day one) and bring back manufacturing jobs. That’s all happening plus that garbage individual mandate from Obamacare has already been repealed, thank God. And I have hope Trump will finally get us out of Afghanistan as well and work with Rand Paul to offer a better health care solution, while protecting anyone with pre-existing conditions (the other good component of the ACA).

To me, Trump is the one who doesn’t sound very republican. (In fact in his 2000 book, “The America We Deserve,” he holds up the Canadian single payer health care system as an example of a plan that we could implement in the US; albeit an improved Trump-version of it, of course!) Or at least, Trump seems like a throwback to the populist Republicans of the early 20th century: he’s no corporatist like Paul Ryan or Romney. That’s why even so many Republicans didn’t like Trump!

Ever since the 2016 election, I have been hellbent on voting for anyone but Dems. And I do mean anyone. Some people might #WalkAway: I’m going to drag myself out of the clutches of the Democratic Party’s lying scheming duplicitous filthy claws and attempt to collapse their entire house of cards on my way out.

Some people might #WalkAway: I’m going to drag myself out of the clutches of the Democratic Party’s lying scheming duplicitous filthy claws and attempt to collapse their entire house of cards on my way out.

But after moving to Washington, DC and becoming a registered Ward 6 voter, even considering a Republican for my District Council member initially felt … so alien. I had figured I would vote for the independent or libertarian candidate. But then I found out about DC Log Cabin Republicans-approved Michael Bekesha.

Michael: “Yes, I’m running as a Republican.

I’m an Urban Republican.

Being a Republican doesn’t mean your anti-choice or anti-marriage equality.

It means that you believe the role of local government is to lift people up.”#Ward6Forum

This whole concept of an “urban republican” sounded interesting. It had a ring to it. It seemed sophisticated. It seemed like the perfect name to print onto the beige label of a bottle of 2019 Rose from the latest California vineyard. Ok, I thought, I’ll take a sip.

I went to Michael’s meet and greet and found out he’s an attorney for Judicial Watch (yay!). I found out he’s pro-choice, pro-marriage equality, and he’s just a cool down to earth guy all around! Super kind and friendly wife, they have a rescue dog, they know DC, having lived here a long time, etc. Good people. When we talked about not paying teachers and cops who work in DC enough to be able to also live (afford housing) in DC proper, he had real solutions to suggest, ones that have worked in other major cities. He’s genuinely worried about the recent uptick in violent crime. He cares about things that matter to every day people, like an aging metro system and getting the government out of the way so people can supplement their income by renting their home out through airbnb. All politics are local, as they say, and I even had a very interesting conversation with him about the role of government in regulating the sale of marijuana.

I thought, this is my type of Republican!! (Cue film noir voiceover: I looked in the mirror, and said to myself, could I be … an urban republican? Perhaps. Perhaps that longing and aching for a party … any party … could finally be … fulfilled!)

And as I canvassed door to door today, I had great conversations with the few registered Republican voters who happened to be home (or answered the door!) as I dutifully followed the trail of pindrops on the app on my phone. A whole lot more convenient than lugging around 20 pages of voters’ names and addresses on a bulky clipboard the way I did 6 years ago, I can tell you that much. This time, constituents shared that their biggest concern was crime and the quality of public schools. Everyone was nice — exactly the same as when I went door to door to registered Dem voters 6 years ago. Might “nice” be a personality trait of the registered voter?

People who vote, I posit, vote because they unconsciously feel that they are following a rule: just as you have to come to a complete stop at a stoplight on red, you have to vote on election day. There’s a good chance that the same people who taught us how to drive, also taught us how to vote — our parents. And this is where the current Dem party leadership takes such a sharp turn away from the Dem party voters. Who are rule followers. The Dem leaders, Feinstein, Pelosi, Schumer, et al, are literally praising rule-breaking — loudly and emphatically — on tv. And all these rule-followers are watching. And shaking their heads.

Which leads me from the local political scene to the national one. Being Republican in DC is basically a non-starter … unless you live in the White House and your name is Donald Trump. Bekesha likely won’t win the Ward 6 race but if he doesn’t run, it’s a total surrender to the one-party system that DC is entrenched in. A lot of people thought Trump was wasting his time and money. But standing firm in our views is never a waste. Every time we stand up and speak out, we add another layer to the snowball that eventually triggers an avalanche.

And President Trump is speaking very loudly: he’s saying things that ALL rule-followers are hearing. Registered voters from ALL parties. And they’re agreeing with those things. And nodding their heads.

One of the things Trump says is if you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country. It’s laughably obvious. He campaigned on enforcing **existing** immigration law. We have rules so that society doesn’t devolve into absolute chaos. No one thinks we put on the breaks at a stop sign so we can appreciate what a lovely job the local municipality did with such a vividly red octagonal accent piece. No one thinks we refrain from budging in line at the grocery store because it’s fun to wait our turn! No. We follow rules because we were taught to respect authority, orto fear authority and the negative consequences of not following the rules. The results are the same, either way: a compliant cooperative populace that *usually* stops at stop signs and doesn’t budge in line. Or kill. Or steal. Or break into someone’s house. Or break into someone’s country. Etc.

Even the Hill is coming to terms with the fact that the left has dug themselves such a deep rhetoric grave, that they’ve created an abyss. It’s very hard to scratch and crawl your way out of an abyss — the best strategy is to avoid falling into one (or for crying out loud, DIGGING ONE RELENTLESSLY) in the first place. The Hill retweeted President Trump saying, “The Democrats don’t like being called an angry mob but, really, that’s what they’ve become. They’ve gone so far left, they can’t even believe that they’re over there.” Now, the Hill wasn’t saying that because they agree with Trump, they were sending out a warning to the Dems: I read between the lines and I think the Hill is desperately trying to remind the Deep State (with whom they are a mainstream media partner and for whom they are a bullhorn) to reel back the gasping bloated struggling donkeys-out-of-water the Democrat Party has become.

But please don’t conflate “dems” with normal people. Because normal people (classical liberals) like me wanted GTMO closed, to get the hell out of Afghanistan, to put our own people first, to hold the big banks accountable for crashing the economy in 2008, to have job and retirement security for Americans, but the Democrat Party leadership have become such shills for a globalist, border-free, US sovereignty violating world order that they’ve lost touch with the everyday man and woman. No, not the “forgotten man and woman,” the blue collar workers whose lives were devastated by NAFTA and other “free” (globalist) trade agreements, who elected President Trump by an electoral college swinging margin in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan, no, I mean the AVERAGE person: the other group of normal, middle-of-the-road, working, tv-watching Americans. And those people PLUS all the forgotten men and women are watching that TV, and they’re seeing with their own eyes thousands of migrant people, mostly men of working age. And they’re reflecting. And they’re drawing a conclusion based on available information, as human beings who aren’t brain-dead are wont to do. And they are agreeing with the sentiments of Tera Marie Major below: this is not a caravan, it’s an invasion.

This is not a caravan, it’s an invasion.

No. This is not a caravan; this is an invasion. Also, why are “asylum seekers” who are running away from their own country proudly marching with a flag but not bothering w/clothing for their babies?— And who are the “organizers” of them as referenced in the article?? pic.twitter.com/L5zVdaHORA

Wouldthe Dems be ok with 4,000 Russians illegally crossing our border? We know the answer. If 4,000 Russians attempted to illegally force their way through our southern border, the Dems would be UP IN ARMS. On the national mall, in front of the White House, parading down 5th Avenue, blockading the subways, the airports and the freeways. “Russian collusion, Russian collusion,” they’d chant, like deranged zombies.

Call me authoritarian, if you must, but the absolute LAWLESSNESS: that is what is so despicable about the Dems’ descent into the LEFT ABYSS. Borders are laws — their overt disDAIN for the basic respect for rules (designed to *prevent* chaos!) will be their own undoing. #WalkAway

Borders are laws. And laws are designed to prevent chaos (and other types of pain, of course). President Trump is right: the Dems have gone so far left, theycan’t even believe they’re over there. Everything they’ve done — from showing us that it’s one tier of justice for you and me, and a separate tier for people with the last name Clinton, to the DNC claiming in open court that they have every right to rig the primaries, regardless of what their charter says, to claiming bizarre denial of reality (i.e., there are more than 2 genders, gender is fluid, and attempting to normalize the sexualization of minors by glorifying child “drag queens” as glamorous instead of acknowledging that those MINORS are being exploited by adults) has shown the WORLD that they are losing their minds. They have no idea that they seem crazy. And they operate in an echo chamber (such as the one established and sustained by the crypt keepers of the abyss known as Twitter) so not only do they avoid any real debate that could lead to a change of heart, their existing viewpoint is freakishly and cultishly reinforced, thanks to such a high degree of isolation.

(In no way am I suggesting that any federal agency would threaten the life of a poor defenseless data cloud in order to leverage a multinational corporation into paying its workers enough money to eat food and pay rent. THIS IS JUST AN EXPLORATION of a funny idea I had for a sketch.)

Ring ring [sound of a telephone ringing]

Bezos: Yes, secretary?

Secretary: It’s the CIA for you, sir.

Bezos: Oh. Ok, put them through … [sound of a call being connected] this is Jeff.

CIA: Nice cloud you have there, Jeffrey. Be a shame if something happened to it.

CIA: Yes, we’ll email you a breakdown by all 50 states plus the District of Columbia. You’re quite the welfare king.

Bezos: Do you know how much prices would increase if I paid everyone enough to get off the dole?

CIA: They wouldn’t have to. Instead of making billions, you’d only make millions. Sounds like you’re the one who feels entitled to the handout.

Bezos: This isn’t even communist! It’s fascist! The CIA is calling me threatening to take my cloud away to extort me!

CIA: Our cloud. It’s our cloud. OUR cloud that you enjoy the privilege of maintaining. You’re welcome. And if you don’t like it, you could always set up shop in Cuba. And we can take our business to IBM.

Bezos: No thanks.

CIA: Well, you wouldn’t have to offer health insurance as a benefit there since Cuba has single payer healthcare.

Bezos: Yeah, and only the rich & well-connected get access to the best doctors. Look, I know what this is: it’s blatant redistribution of wealth. This is all Bernie Sanders’ doing.

CIA: It’s not redistributing anything. You get to keep the billions you’ve already made. Look, I made a cool $90k last year & if I died tomorrow, I’d be happy & know I lived a good life serving my country.

FBI: He doesn’t feel joy, CIA. He’s not capable of feeling contentedness so don’t go down that road.

Bezos: Who’s that?

CIA: Oh, that’s just the FBI. Their profilers told us to use pride & your compulsion to avoid societal shame since you don’t feel guilt or empathy like a normal person. But … we’re not going to waste time on that profiling BS. We’re going straight to force.

Bezos: The FBI is on the line!? What?

CIA: They’re always on the line.

FBI: Yeah, PATRIOT Act. Just kidding. FISA Amendments of 2008.

CIA: lol

FBI: ha ha

Bezos: I grew up poor! What about that?

CIA: Lots of people grew up poor. They don’t grow up to be parasites that exploit every loophole in the War on Poverty known to man.

FBI: Yeah, you’re a sociopath.

Bezos: I’m not a sociopath. I’m a philanthropist!

CIA: I’m about to break this cloud.

FBI: Lol, most philanthropists are sociopaths. Although some are narcissists. But, not Bezos.

Bezos: You’re talking about me as if I weren’t here. I can hear you.

NSA: We can hear you.

Bezos: Who the hell was that?

CIA: Ohhhhh. Soooo sorry. That’s now how this works. We ask the questions. You answer them! See? Here’s one I just came up with. What date are you going to start paying your employees a living wage? I have a calendar here. I’m looking at it now. Let me know if you need help. I can help you, Jeff.

CIA: Why do we let a handful of CEO’s take advantage of our people this way? Our countrymen?

FBI: Congress. Those scoundrels.

CIA: What a bunch of rapscallions. And the amount of porn they watch, good grief.

NSA: And the type of porn they watch.

Bezos: What the fuck is this?

CIA: What is what? I’m pulling the plug on Mr Cloud. Who doesn’t love the scent of autumnal rainfall, am I right? Tell me I’m wrong. Singing in the rain!

Bezos: Oh my God, the CIA is threatening me!!

FBI: That sounded more like a promise than a threat to me.

NSA: Yeah, definitely a promise. You shouldn’t have been mean to your workers.

FBI: We know what you did.

Bezos’ Lawyer: You don’t speak, Jeff. Not another word.

CIA: Oh, this is ridiculous. Just pay your workers, for God’s sake. It’s not like we’re sending in the DOL with guns blazing. On a DOL tank.

FBI: No one is being charged with any crime. And there aren’t typically Department of Labor tanks.

DOD: Not that we couldn’t retrofit one for a special occasion.

CIA: Like, for example, storming Amazon headquarters.

Amazon General Counsel: Just exactly how much of a wage increase are we talking here?

CIA: $15 an hour is a good start.

Amazon General Counsel: Jeff, it’s not a terrible demand. We can make it work.

CIA: Do you know how many macrame invisibility ponchos we could make with a billion dollars?

DARPA: Ten.

CIA: Oh, so fewer than I thought.

Bezos: So to recap, you’re holding the cloud hostage until I pay my workers $31,000 a year?

CIA: $31,200. Which won’t even be enough money to get them off the dole in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, LA or Washington, DC. Would you rather Bernie’s law passes and you can repay every dime of public assistance your workers receive? We can make that happen.

Bezos: $31,000 a year for entry level work?!?

CIA: $31,000 a year for work. Lol, “entry level” work. That’s like saying “conspiracy theorist” to refer to someone who presents a fact-based narrative regarding events of historical import in order to encourage the pursuit of truth and accuracy in the face of unanswered questions. It costs what it costs to live. The government subsidizing the price of food, rent & healthcare has artificially suppressed the cost of labor for decades. Again, this won’t be retroactive. So look on the bright side.

CIA: The bottom line is that it costs what it costs to live. We’d rather covertly force one bad actor to do the right thing, and then sit back and watch free market competition among firms cause wages to rise because the other bad actors are now forced to offer higher wages in order to compete in a tighter labor market, rather than pulling the subsidy rug out from under an artificially depressed minimum wage suddenly, impacting all firms simultaneously.

CIA: Well, the streets don’t sweep themselves. Look, even if some day on the off OFF chance Amazon was forced to break into pieces under anti-trust law … in the rare instance that monopoly-combatting laws were ever enforced … even if you never made another dollar, you and your family would be set for life, many many lifetimes.

FBI: Again, you might as well be trying to teach a pack of wolves to take a break from gorging on their fresh kill. He’s a broken person. He’ll never feel satiation: he can’t. Neurologically. The neuropathways just don’t connect that way. They never did.

Amazon General Counsel: That’s enough. What do we have to do to end this call.

NSA: Everyone is getting disconnected now. At the same time. You two — get a room.

Bezos: Unbefuckinglievable

CIA: No, you know what’s unbeLIEVable? Bilking the American taxpayer for millions of dollars ANNUALLY and then jibber jabbering about free shipping. There is NO SUCH THING AS FREE SHIPPING. The consumer is paying for it. How do people not know this?

NSA: It’s because we don’t teach logic in the schools. Also the fluoride in the water probably doesn’t help.

FBI: Don’t forget no one’s parents are home after school to help with homework.

CIA: Ok, who’s calling Bernie to tell him the good news?

[FADE TO BLACK]

Author’s note: Bezos changed his tune quite literally overnight. From doubling down on his anti-Bernie messaging through his paid shills on twitter to announcing (in a little over a month!) that a wage increase would be implemented (fewer than 30 days later!). I’m not saying any federal agency had anything to do with it. But if they did, good.

Exactly the way to go about it; these gigantic corporate parasites only survive because their workers' housing, food (SNAP) + healthcare are subsidized by the American taxpayer. One week of this consequence and guaran-gosh-damn-tee Bezos will be begging to raise workers' wages. https://t.co/TLPAImdT9w

Here’s what to say, how to call, and the video of me saying it on the White House comment line!

(For those who think Wikileaks is “Russian Wikileaks” or think that there is some conspiracy between Julian Assange and Russia, you’ve been dis-informed and for that I am deeply sorry because our country is being divided and conquered. **scroll down if you already know this part** You may or may not think that the leakers themselves should be prosecuted — that’s a different issue. Seth Rich was the leaker of the DNC emails, and I believe he is the 21st Century Nathan Hale; he quite literally died (was murdered) for the freedom of Americans in order to expose corruption of a ruling party, and the collusion between the DNC and a primary candidate to ensure a particular outcome in an election process for the leader of the United States of America in 2016. Please learn more about why Seth Rich is the 21st Century Nathan Hale by clicking here. And see the tweets below in order to learn more about Wikileaks as a news organization. Wikileaks is an equal opportunity publisher: if there is corruption in ANY government and they get their hands on proof of it, they WILL publish it.

From Wikileaks: “Russia’s laws – especially the new Yarovaya Law – make literally no distinction between Lawful Interception and mass surveillance by state intelligence authorities (SIAs) without court orders. Russian communication providers are required by Russian law to install the so-called SORM ( Система Оперативно-Розыскных Мероприятий) components for surveillance provided by the FSB at their own expense. The SORM infrastructure is developed and deployed in Russia with close cooperation between the FSB, the Interior Ministry of Russia and Russian surveillance contractors.”

So, newsflash, Wikileaks wants to expose corruption wherever it finds it, not just in the US government.

If you film yourselfcalling the White House, and tweet me with the link on twitter at @Sarah__Reynolds, I will embed it on this website!! The script I used is below this video.

PROFANITY ALERT: here’s my attempt from the day before, but I called too late in the day to get to leave my comment. You do speak to a real human being, but you have to call 1 (202) 456-1111 between the hours of 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. Eastern Time. I was slightly irritated by this because during the Obama Administration when I called and read the 8th Amendment over the phone during the time Manning was being held at Quantico with no blanket and forced to be naked and cold, I didn’t have to be transferred to the comment line. So, you can watch that video too. (Ok, I drop one tinyF-bomb. No big whoop!)

LONG VERSION of the Script (also great for copy/pasting into the online comment form online or into a handwritten letter; scroll down for the short version)

Hi, my name is ____ and I’m calling from (city, state, country).

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[SKIP THIS NEXT SENTENCE IF YOU’RE NOT A SUPPORTER OF TRUMP]

I am a supporter of President Trump, I voted for him in 2016 (and plan on voting for him again in 2020). (please don’t say you’re planning on voting for him again in 2020 if you’re not going to)

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Today I’m calling to ask the President to grant Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks, a preemptive pardon and to ask him to direct the Justice Department to drop all charges against Mr Assange and Wikileaks. The New York Times, the Guardian, and the Washington Post all published news articles based on the documents published by Wikileaks, and even the New York Times’ own General counsel has said that prosecuting Assange would set “a very very bad precedent for publishers …” and that “the Law would have a very hard time drawing a distinction between the New York Times and Wikileaks.” The First Amendment protects the American people’s right to read news articles, whether printed on paper or published online, and the Founders guaranteed this right as part of the very first Amendment because they knew that freedom of the press was foundational to preserving our constitutional republic.

President Trump said, “I love wikileaks” over and over again at his 2016 campaign rallies, and the American people cheered his brave appreciation for Wikileaks’ willingness to publish emails that revealed corruption and collusion at the highest levels of our American government, as evidence in both the DNC emails and Podesta emails shows.

So I ask President Trump to work with other world leaders to ensure Mr Assange’s safe passage from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to his home country of Australia. Additionally, he has been granted asylum by Ecuador, and the United States and the United Kingdom should respect the protected status of Mr Assange under international law.

Thank you very much.

SHORTER:

Hi, my name is ________.

I’m calling to ask President Trump to grant Julian Assange, the founder and publisher of Wikileaks, a preemptive pardon and to ask him to direct the Justice Department to drop all charges against Mr Assange and Wikileaks. As Assange has been granted asylum by Ecuador, the United States and the United Kingdom should respect the protected status of Mr Assange under international law; and so I ask President Trump to work with other world leaders to ensure Mr Assange’s safe passage from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to his home country of Australia.

Like this:

When we move across the country, we don’t always get the best people. Sometimes we don’t even get the best people in our family. But if you’re lucky enough to have someone who cares about you enough to drop everything they’re doing to drive 1,000 miles (technically 1097.98) with you in a 1993 Cadillac Deville stuffed to the brim with boxes, books and clothes, you have someone in your life who actually cares about you. I’m lucky that person is in my family.

The morning of the move, I periscoped from my empty apartment in St Paul where I’d lived for three years. I am unbelievably grateful for my aunt and uncle who helped me cram everything into the car, and mention that in the periscope; big families, though not right for everyone, are great and I’m so thankful my mom was third of eight and that my aunt (the 5th of those 8) is someone who has always cared about me, and been there for me since my mom passed away when I was 19. My cousin who drove down with me helped my Uncle play tetris with my boxes of stuff until everything fit in the Caddy.

… and let’s not forget this dictionary I was hanging on to for some ungodly reason … (and don’t worry, fellow etymologyphiles, I have two others! Bigger! Better!!)

My well loved “3 piece dictionary” – my cousin Katie is making me throw it away!! My dictionary since 8th grade! She claims I can use the internet — that I can pick any word & Siri can tell me anything about that word!!! pic.twitter.com/OCgKgTBnts

And we had a great trip down … the first day was totally free of drama. We listened to lots of songs by the amazing “Atmosphere” who is well known in MN … is he as loved around the rest of the country?

Morning two? Not so much. We checked out of the motel in Maumee, Ohio, and loaded our stuff back in the Cadillac only to discover that the ignition would not turn over. I googled a local car shop and called and asked for a jump start because I figured they would send someone who knew what to do once they discovered it wasn’t actually the battery that was the problem. They did! The nice young kid told me my charger is going out and he advised me not to turn off the car. I said, “we’re going all the way to DC!” And he said, “Then I really wouldn’t turn off the car.”

We didn’t. Every time we stopped for gas, we left the car running while we filled up. The hours sped by. By 4 pm, we were only 110 miles away.

I was so excited of course, that I had been playing “Come and Ride the Train” on repeat which my cousin and co-pilot informed me was the definition of torture (she’s not wrong — loud music played on repeat has definitely been used on people in a torture-ish way). So I asked twitter and they TOTALLY DISAGREED.

Who LOVES the song “Come & Ride the Train”? Cousin Katie wants me to specify that “loves” means seat-dancing in the car to it 5 x in a row

I think I was more spooked by running out of gas and miraculously being able to direct my cousin to pull over in the triangle of an exit ramp than I was by ending up sitting on Seth Rich’s ACTUAL BARSTOOL (later that same night) where he drank the last drink of his life before being murdered 2 summers ago.

I think it’s because I’ve almost died in a car three times in life. And every time, once you realize you’re alive and haven’t caused a 12 car pile up (or any accident at all, as has always been the miraculous case in my three near-death car experiences), you look around and go, “God, I’m lucky. So damn lucky.”

And we made it. We made it to my new apartment in Logan Circle, and I was just in the nick of time (after GEICO sent AAA with $5 of gas so we could make it to the gas station) to change and haul ass over to Jack Murphy’s Democrat to Deplorable book release party! I walked in embarrassingly late and then managed to find myself at Seth Rich’s neighborhood bar afterwards. Dear Lord.

Road trips are fun. And by fun I mean, stressful as hell. But I’m here!

(Here’s the periscope I did talking about how everything worked out just after posting this blogpost)

**For those new to my blog and to the analysis of tribal roles, including alpha, beta, sigma and omega, please know that beta is a very real tribal role; in our everyday speech, we as a society use “beta” as an adjective to refer to weak or submissive male behavior, but in the sense of tribal roles, betas are great! Most people are betas. Alphas lead, betas follow, omegas often operate as outcasts, but when healthy, are contributing if highly introverted members of the tribe, and sigmas are the lone wolves of the tribe, highly autonomous, for better or for worse. For more on tribal roles, you may enjoy my videos on youtube.

I had the mis (or maybe dis?) fortune of triggering a troll the other night when I was tweeting “observations from a barstool” while enjoying a drink at my local watering hole. I noticed a couple on a first date and live tweeted as I watched their date go from decent to interesting to fizzled out.

2 female friends sitting across from each other in a booth … the one on the left, very introverted, normally withdrawn. The more extroverted slightly younger friend's animated face & hands draw the introvert out of her normal social discomfort.

As they grow more interesting to each other, it becomes uncomfortable to twist toward each other. He moves his whole body 45 degrees so that he is facing her more directly. He keeps one elbow on the bar at all times to show that he's cool & not *too interested.*

Two omega friends-2 straight men-share beers. They don't handle their liquor well (omegas never do) & so they each only have one beer …. sipping it very very slowly. They wish girls could be like this, just cool, not so emotionally confusing. The aura of RELIEF surrounds them.

They need to both get on OK Cupid — STAT! It’s all a numbers game!! FIND HER!!

A family — a dad, a mom, and a teenage girl (17?) have dinner. Mom stares at her food mostly. Daughter is obediently avoiding her phone … dad looks at daughter. When did things change? Denial is their bandaid. The gaping head wound begins to fester.

This was gross to watch. I wanted to tweet more. Buuuuuuut, decided not to.

If this keeps up, he'll have to marry her! She's so normal! So funny, so open, so not fake! (they are both betas – they believe in being on time, making the max deposit into one's 401k, and that lying is generally ok, especially if it will end an uncomfortable situation…

Remember, betas are grrrrreat! They take minimal risks, they plan for the future, and they are suggestible so that during times of crisis, they will follow a strong Alpha’s direction, ensuring the survival of themselves and their offspring. Being a beta is NOT BAD!! The vast majority of the tribe falls into the beta category. They care about appearances and thus shower, brush their teeth, go to work, pay their taxes and go along to get along. Without betas, society would literally collapse on itself! (Don’t worry, Alphas, society would collapse without you too — lol.)

The first date couple begin to fizzle … she goes to the bathroom & is gone far too long.

He follows her (!!) out of the room/bar & they go their separate ways. They both are in it to win it – they know it's a numbers game & the "One" is or could be right around the corner. Serial daters. Online dating veterans. Time will tell.

It’s fascinating to me that some men are perfectly ok with rating women on a 1 – 10 scale (as am I) but still get triggered by a woman who is aware that she has been rated & knows her tier & wants to find a man on the same level! I mean, REALLY!?!

So of course I pointed this out to my more triggered members of my Twitter family…

I am always fascinated by a man who is okay with POTUS rating women on a 1 – 10 scale (I am!) but who gets triggered by a woman who is aware that she has been rated & knows her tier & wants to find a man on the same level! L O fucking L!

Some women who are intuitive "just know" on the 1st date: they are doing men a *kindness* by not going on a second date & wasting time & money and giving any false impression that there is potential for a future relationship.

In truth, I have no idea *what* it was! They had equal levels of fertility/virility indicators (beauty/handsomeness & youth). But the "leaugue" we're in is also determined by money (or creativity which is the potential for future money) & finally, confidence.

And confidence is the most important determining factor of our "league" or tier or rating. Bravery LITERALLY determines whether empires will fall. Brave people take more risks. If they're also smart, eventually, one of those risks will pay off.

Confidence is THEE most heavily weighted factor in the Rank Algorithm. Most people simply aren’t confident. It’s fine — in fact, too much confidence can lead to overwhelming losses that reduce the quality of life for an entire tribe (October of 2008 ring a bell? Thanks, Banksters, for that years long recession). Should highly confident people mate with other highly confident people? It depends. Unhealthy confident people will feel threatened and thus competitive with other confident people and not want to date or court them. Happy healthy confident people usually feel attracted to other confident people and are triggered into a protective mode by those who lack confidence.

So, did she run to bathroom,call her friend & say, "he's nice, I just don't feel attracted to him"? Probably. And she might not be able to articulate what it was about him. But her survival instinct knows: an issue w/money (which ensures food&shelter), confidence or intelligence.

But even more than being pro-marriage, I'm pro-LOVE. I've *seen* 50 year marriages between soulmates. It's real but RARE. The internet allows us to *reduce* the rarity by using Compatibility Matching. Imagine an improved algorithm that matches you with only others in your "tier"!

For those who are interested, our “league” or rank in our tribe is determined by confidence, intelligence, and beauty/handsomeness. Then for women it is sub-determined by youth (because a woman is fertile for only a finite period of her life) and for men it is sub-determined by money/income (because money is how a man would pay for food and shelter for the offspring he has co-created, and especially because he remains fertile for an indefinite period of his life).

Ideally, we would delineate, even within each of the matching/dating sites, those users who are interested in dating and those who want to pursue a courtship path leading ultimately to marriage.

Ladies, if he isn’t willing to literally gamble half of everything he has or ever will have, on a marriage to you, he DOESN’T love you. Marriage was designed to protect a woman from the poverty of her own fertility, set forth in a legally binding contract guaranteeing that if she gave up her ability to trade her time for money by forgoing freedom for motherhood, she would still be able to ensure food and shelter for herself and her offspring. A contract that also guaranteed that if the father chose to stopproviding those things as a part of their sex for socioeconomic security trade (marriage), the government could force him to start up again. Remember, marriage is the LEGAL, PUBLIC DECLARATION of loyalty, commitment and responsibility.

Like this:

The first woman CIA director! President Trump has nominated current CIA Deputy Director Gina Haspel to become the new Director after Mike Pompeo goes over to the State Department.

Click on the image to watch “First Impressions.”

Sigma women are mission oriented, crave and demand autonomy and independence, are profoundly loyal and tend to be truly known by only a very few close members of their family and friend groups. They do not fit into a societal mold that requires marriage, children or other cultural indicators of success. They make great leaders but do not seek leadership positions for the sake of having authority over others; they endure leadership positions for the sake of protecting the greater good of the tribe.

Click on the image to watch “Gina Haspel: Sigma Female Body Language & Speech Pattern Analysis” and find out what Sarah thinks that Johnny Cash poster is really all about!

Alpha males and sigma males get along great (99% of the time!!) … watch these two meet and become fast friends. Alpha males have nick names for everyone and Sigmas secretly love to know that they are valued enough by the tribe to have the Alpha bestow a moniker on them. Ambassador John Bolton (soon to be National Security Advisor John Bolton) is the classic Sigma male and General James Mattis is an alpha male who definitely wants Bolton on his team.

Click the image to watch the video on bitchute. Thank you for watching!

Interim Director of the FBI Andrew McCabe is as corrupt as the day is long! Even his subordinates say he’s a screamer and discriminates against them. And what’s thiiiiiiis? General Mike Flynn was willing to testify on Supervisory Special Agent Robyn Gritz’ behalf AGAINST her direct supervisor (at the time) Andrew McCabe in sex discrimination lawsuit? What’s that? McCabe gave her nasty critical annual reviews to prevent her from being promoted? What now, General Flynn wrote her a glowing review on Pentagon stationery in stark contrast to Andy “I have a blatant man crush on Jim Comey” McCabe?

Or click on the link below to listen — it will open in a new window! Hear your favorite progressive patriot analyze the speech patterns & body language of corrupt McCabe when he testifies before the House Intel Committee. Somebody has an intense man-crush on Comey. DAMN.

Like this:

For those who’ve followed me since I was a Bernie supporter – and before I boarded the Trump Train in July of 2016 — you know that I lost several friends due to my vocal support of Trump on Twitter. Not for sharing my support of Trump on fB, not for sharing my support for him at work, not around my family, not around my friends in our social group in person (because I mentioned nothingabout Trump on any of those platforms or around any of those people), but ONLY for tweeting about it. Yes, you may recall that two of my friends (married to each other) ended their friendship with me because I said on twitter that I could not in good conscience vote for Hillary now that Bernie was out of the race. At the time, I was just warming to Trump and was relieved that he was using terms like fair trade and understood that NAFTA eviscerated the American middle class, and was campaigning on ending endless war and actually defeating ISIS instead of perpetuating the Middle East quagmire for another 15 years (in contrast to Hillary who laughed gleefully about the sodomized-to-death Qaddafi and the cesspool of despair that replaced his strongman rule in Libya after her State Department raped that country). These two ex-friends literally texted me (because that is how you diplomatically end a nine year friendship), “We know it sounds petty, but if you support Trump, we can’t be friends.” So why do I bring them up? Because one of them was a female to male transgender. One who went to Court to get his driver’s license to say M instead of F.

Now, despite the fact that I was shocked and hurt that they (and he especially, because we worked together before he started his hormone therapy and most people unconsciously still automatically referred to him as HER and I accepted him exactly as he wanted to be accepted without further judgment) ended our friendship, I still support trans issues. Why? Because I believe that if we demand that people conform to a social norm that requires deception, then we as a society are complicit in committing fraud against the inevitable victim. A similar example is when society forces gay men to “act straight” and marry women. In that case too, all of society acts as the collective warden who keeps the woman who finds herself in a loveless (and eventually sexless) marriage imprisoned. If people born male who felt like they should have been born female (and the reverse) were allowed to transition without further comment the way gay people are allowed to marry each other, we would avoid the problem of fraud-based unions and all the unhappiness that floods the immediate family as well as the extended tribe from there.

If we demand that people conform to a social norm that requires deception, then we as a society are complicit in committing fraud against the inevitable victim.

But a third category? A “neither he nor she” gender class? People who’d get an X on their driver’s license instead of an M or an F? That’s bullshit. And it’s bullshit of the most insidious kind. Why? Because it’s actually the best way to delegitimize the trans rights movement.

(And by rights, I literally mean, the freedom of my friend and others like him to live as the gender they feel they should have been born into and/or legal protection from the government taking action to prevent him and people like him from doing so. I mean, he’s married to a woman — they go out into the world as man and wife and now that he’s fully transitioned, you’d have no idea he was ever female, unlike, I’m sorry to say, trans women who still give me that man feeling even after they’ve had the ultimate surgery. Although, who knows — I may have met some trans women who transitioned so well that I just took them for born-female individuals when they weren’t. So, ok — benefit of the doubt.)

The best way to stop the movement in its tracks, especially after people like Caitlyn Jenner are helping mainstream America understand that transgender is a thing and does happen, even to extremely masculine men, would be to infiltrate it with people who want to introduce absurdity into the discussion — making ridiculous patently false baseless claims like, “there is no gender.” And here I want to make an important logic-based point. If there is no gender, then how can a person “identify” as the opposite gender? Trans people, by definition (and in order to be diagnosed and prescribed the hormone drugs necessary to “transition” by a medical doctor) must have symptoms that meet this description: “strong, persistent feelings of identification with the opposite gender and discomfort with one’s own assigned sex that results in significant distress or impairment. People with gender dysphoria desire to live as members of the opposite sex.” The OPPOSITE sex. Without two opposite sexes, you can’t “identify” with the one you’re not. Don’t let me over-explain this — I know you get it. Without two genders, you can’t transition from one to the other. And by gender I mean sex, of course, and by sex, I mean gender in this context (which is why our state I.D.’s as well as our birth certificates say “sex” on them).

So people, every day Americans, were just starting to warm (or thaw?) to the idea of trans people when in walk these pseudo-liberal infiltrators who start blabbing at the mouth this nonsense about gender as a continuum — or, even more counterproductively, about gender as an illusion. And let me say, I too was skeptical of transgenderism and I was raised by an open-minded mom who was in the antiques business and had several gay male friends who were really nice to me and good friends and customers of hers. I never knew homophobia — it just wasn’t part of what I was exposed to growing up. And even I thought “trans” was weird when at age 26 I met my first real life trans person. Really weird. It took getting to know someone close to me who could give me a glimpse into the very real hell he went through during puberty, feeling literally like he was in the wrong body. I mean, it sounded so sad and terrible to me. But I admit, also very bizarre. He had a girlfriend who was a very feminine woman … I had to really process what I was seeing. I slipped often and accidentally used female pronouns to describe him in a way that would not have happened if I had met him after he transitioned and he finally “looked” like a guy after taking Testosterone.

So I get it when everyday people go, “Ok, this is just weird. Is trans like … gay? Cause I’ve known some gays.” Then you put people like Caitlyn Jenner on the TV and they go, “Ok, it’s still weird but it’s less out there than before because Bruce Jenner was an Olympian I’ve heard of. Hmm, I’ll think about it.” So people’s minds opened to what transgenderism is and while the skepticism remained, a national conversation was at least happening. But insert people like the sadistic MAN (below) who was the first in the country to get an X on his Washington, DC driver’s license into the national dialogue and, suddenly, people’s minds shut faster than a cellar door during a late night summer storm. And for good reason. It’s a ploy: it’s a divide and conquer strategy. This guy is a full of shit LIAR who just wants to make people uncomfortable and gets off on it (I suspect – I suspect it makes his DICK hard because he has a DICK because he’s a MAN with a PENIS).

This WaPo story tells of MISTER Nik Sakurai of a Washington, DC who just applied for a big X rather than the standard M on his driver’s license. Guess what? He went to an all boys high school and came out as gay and bi at some point(s) during his senior year. Ok, fine. But then he decides that he’s really more of a They/Them person and “gender neutral” than a He/Him and male. For the logic based reason I described earlier, this undermines the trans movement which requires 2 genders (2 sexes) to transition between, by definition, but it also denigrates the very real pain of trans people who feel that they were born into the wrong body! (Imagine that! Really imagine what that would be like, please! It would be a living horror movie. Only your real life.) But there’s another more sinister component at the core of this attempt to create a third gender. Forced speech. I mentioned earlier that had I met my (former) trans friend after he’d been on Testosterone, I would not have guessed he’d been born female. And how he explained it to me was, “I identify as male” not, “I am really male and in denial of the uterus I have,” but with the acknowledgement/caveat that he is not actually male but would like to appear to be so that society sees him that way because that’s how he feels in his mind. That’s A HUGE difference. The first acknowledges reality and talks about identifying as the opposite gender as a compulsion; the second denies reality, much like Nik here who wants to “identify” with something that doesn’t exist.

D.C. is not the only place where one can obtain a driver’s license that indicates that they identify with an imaginary state of existence. Now Oregon passed a law making it an option on their driver’s licenses too. Watch the brief video about it, courtesy of Big League Politics, below.

Gender neutrality is not real. And we as a society MUST protest the idea that it is, but even more than “we as a society,” actual trans people must fight this concept and these infiltrators, and fight them hard, and WIN. Because the goal of Nik and people like him is not to create a loving accepting society where people can be free to be who they are; it’s to use FORCE to FORCE people to comply to their vision of a gender-LESS society, the one they are taking action to create, every single day.

There’s another more sinister component at the core of this attempt to create a third gender. Forced speech.

In the spring of 2016, I took a class at St Catherine University, at the time a women-only school (I was taking this class with the day students while being enrolled in the Evening Weekend Online program) called “the Philosophy of Sex, Sexuality and Love” and in this class, there was a young woman who was attempting to sort through who and what she was. She was very open about having identified as everything there is possible to identify as, gay, bi, cis (cis is short for cisgender and means born female, identifies as a straight woman OR born male, identifies as a straight man). Presently, she had chosen a gender neutral name and was using male pronouns. Unlike my friend who was literally dying to get on Testosterone at that age and who chose a masculine name when he changed his name (which he did in court, not just by telling everyone, I go by “_______” now), she was very flippant about exploring all the “nonbinary” options. I was struck by something so insincere about her. About her demeanor. About her speech affect. And, I couldn’t help feeling so bad for my friend (all over again) who had felt so profoundly alienated by a female body and wanted nothing more than to have been born male so he wouldn’t have to hurt his family by becoming — literally — someone else. In contrast, this undergrad’s nonchalant chitchat about gender identity came across as shallow and demeaning of actually trans people, whose emotional compulsion to seek the gender role ascribed by society to the opposite sex is unyielding — and authentic. I chalked it up to the normal teenage angst that many people go through and figured that at the least, I’d meet some interesting people in the class and have some interesting philosophical arguments over the course of the semester. But around day two, this immature person revealed her actual desire: to assert dominance over all members of the class by inserting herself into the authority position, usurping the leadership of even the professor in the power dynamic. She “suggested” that we all declare our pronoun. She explained that she was going by he/him (for now, of course — she wasn’t taking Testosterone: “he/him” was her feeling of the year) and would like to know what everyone else goes by. And OF COURSE, no one reacted. Not one of the WOMEN in the class or the WOMAN professor. I blinked. My gut flagged this display as an attempt to assert dominance and leverage control but I was caught so off guard that I was at a loss for words. Could the professor have denied this request? I mean … yes, of course. And so could I have. But I didn’t. I went right a-fucking-long and said, “she/her” as one by one, the class played a distorted version of “duck duck gray duck” chair by chair, woman by woman, force making its way around a circle that made a mockery of any kind of round table discussion.

And here’s why. Force it was. Forced speech. I was forced to speak. I didn’t need to declare my pronoun. No one in the room did. (Did I mention it was a women’s college at the time?) Yet each of us submissively displayed compliance to this request. In marked contrast, actually trans people want to present as the opposite gender so well, so authentically, that they no longer NEED to declare their gender. They want to pass as that gender — no questions asked. How do we know? Because trans people born male are PAYING MONEY to have their penises removed. I need to cry for a second. But fine. If that’s what they want to do, FINE. That’s freedom. But it’s NOT freedom when I am forced to speak, forced to declare the obvious in an obvious situation. Here’s what I wish I would have said:

“No. I’m not going to declare my pronoun. If you’re making a special request of me to call you by a specific pronoun, then I’m happy to oblige and use “him and he” because I would have thought you identified as a girl. So thank you, so much, for letting me know. So, to clarify, you are asking me, Sarah, to refer to you, _____, by him and he, is that right?”

And in response to further cries from the crib requests to declare my pronoun, if necessary, “you can use whatever words you want in reference to me – your perception of me has no bearing on my perception of me. If there is anyone in the room in doubt as to my gender identity, please, just go with your best guess.”

The depths of the collective cultural denial of reality that were required for everyone in that room to subserviently go along to get along are astounding to me. And I apologize to myself for not being ready for it. That will never happen again.

This is how far this movement to normalize the collective denial of reality has gone already:

These people want there to be NO genders at ALL, no defined categories. They’ll tell you they don’t want “labels” but they really don’t want any gender at all. And that is the stuff of a dystopian nightmare. I will blog further about what I see as a possible future if we continue to go down that path but for now, let me close with a little story about my parents, yes — the ones who met in a Las Vegas casino, my super liberal mom and super libertarian dad. They didn’t want me to feel forced into any gender stereotypes as they raised me so my childhood bedroom was decorated in all primary colors. No pink and no blue allowed. My sister, 12 years older than I am (and 12 at the time), got to pick everything out so she picked out wall art with bright bunches of balloons — orange, red, yellow and green, and cute white clouds, all fabric, to hang on the walls. The blanket was a bright bold red and the pillows were green and yellow (they put a twin bed in the room with the crib so that the room would be multipurpose from the get go). Somehow she got away with a fabric rainbow wall-hang because “a rainbow is an actual natural phenomenon in nature” (dad) and “it’s not pastel” (mom) so there was one stripe of blue in the room when the original rule was no pink or blue. Now, the carpet: it was fabulous shag magenta carpet (come on, it was 1981). I loved this carpet till the day I left at 18. My sister sold this to them as purple (yes, she grew up to be a lawyer) and they in turn had a long discussion about whether purple has a gender stereotype attached to it. (Sigh. I know.) Now, I was allowed to pick out the toys I wanted as a child and was never forced to play with anything or told I couldn’t play with anything. Guess what my favorite thing to do was? Play Black Jack or 500 or Gin with my mom — or games like Clue or Who Dunnit with whoever would play, and I love love LOVED the game Tripoley. I had some dolls and even though I liked Nintendo and was fairly good at it, I loved to watch my cousins rescue Princess Peach for HOURS (my one cousin could do every single level, no warp tunnels, in about 28 minutes — I couldn’t get past level 6). I’d beat anyone who’d play Duck Hunt against me hands down and my cousin and I would partner against my mom while playing Nintendo Jeopardy. No one told me I couldn’t shoot the Nintendo gun because I was a girl but interestingly, I hated playing any sports, HATED IT. I hated being outside, especially if it was cold, and I hated being on teams, so fricking much. I naturally gravitated toward activities that made me think, like reading, writing or games. I liked Barbies but got very bored very quickly unless I was creating an elaborate backstory for their lives. So there was no attempt to keep me from pursuing stereotypical “girl” activities. Nor was there any attempt to force me to pursue “boy” activities. When I was 15, my mom let me paint my whole room lilac and hang a poster of Brandon Lee from the Crow above my bed. It said, “Believe in angels.” (Best movie of ALL TIME — lol, the traditional gender roles! And the vengeance! And the violence! And the sex! Bahahahaha! My mom got a kick out of the results of their experiment: Give a child total freedom and exert no influence over their tastes and preferences and when that child grows into a 15 year old girl, she might still end up being filled with glee at the romance-based serial murder of anyone who threatens the eternal love of the main characters.)

Compare my parents to the parents of the newborn baby mentioned in the tweet above, the baby with no “gender marker” on its health card. My mom and dad were trying to avoid ridiculous societal limitations such as, “boys become doctors, girls become nurses” and “girls become paralegals and boys become lawyers” and they did a damn good job. But by denying a newborn baby a sex on its birth certificate, the parents in the tweet aren’t rejecting stereotypes or “traditional gender roles,” they are denying REALITY.

My parents did a good job despite their many flaws. They taught me to question the motivation behind every message: who is telling me to believe this? Why? What emotion is it designed to make me feel? What action is it designed to make me take? Who benefits? Who profits? Is it rooted in greed for power or greed for money or both? These are the questions we need to be asking ourselves regarding this bizarre movement mandating forced speech and the attempt to neuter society itself.

***JUNE 13 UPDATE: The US Trade Rep has extended the comment period until June 14th at midnight due to overwhelming response. Please continue reading for an easy copy/paste letter to submit online.***

The Trump administration is requesting public comments on what its NAFTA negotiating objectives should be. So lets flood the government with comments demanding a deal that puts jobs and families before CEO bonuses, and the American people & American workers first.

POTUS @realDonaldTrump kept his promise to pull us out of the TPP on his 3rd day in office! Now it's time to fix NAFTA & put America first.

In July, the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (@USTradeRep on twitter), which will lead the renegotiation talks, must reveal a detailed plan. And hundreds of corporate lobbyists will demand NAFTA become even worse for working people and the environment.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Perspective https://t.co/a5Q7jAF14U great 3 min video on the HORRORS of NAFTA

But thousands of comments from people like us (especially Berners, Trump supporters and Berner-turned-Trump train riders like myself) can drown the corporate demand that NAFTA become TPP 2.0. President Trump kept his campaign promise to pull the United States out of the TPP on his third full day in office! Let’s ask him and the US trade rep to keep his promise to fix NAFTA too. (Scroll down for a link to the comment page and an easy copy/paste script.)

(The text below is courtesy of Public Citizen Global Trade Watch – I’ve made a few changes to make it my own & it’s best if we all make some so that there aren’t thousands of identical comments. I especially changed the first paragraph because theirs left a lot to be desired. More #NAFTA tweets below this copy/paste portion.)

Renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement must stop NAFTA’s ongoing evisceration of the United States economy and replace it with a deal that benefits working people and the American economy, not just the profit margins of corporations. Five million manufacturing jobs have been lost since NAFTA was signed into law by President Clinton: that’s one in every four manufacturing jobs lost by an American worker.

Trans-Pacific Partnership terms should not be added to any new NAFTA. President Trump said he’s against the TPP because it would hurt American workers and he formally withdrew the United States from TPP negotiations on his third day in office. So why does his Commerce Secretary say TPP is the starting place for NAFTA talks? The only way NAFTA will be “much better” for the US economy is if these criteria are met:

First, we need a transparent negotiating process. The original NAFTA and the TPP were negotiated behind closed doors with hundreds of corporate trade advisors included and the public and Congress excluded. As a result, those deals didn’t prioritize creating good jobs, raising wages or safeguarding our domestic policies. U.S.-proposed NAFTA texts and draft consolidated texts after each negotiating session must be made public. The corporate advisory system must be replaced by an on-the-record public process to get input on draft text during negotiations and comment on proposed final texts.

And we need to eliminate NAFTA’s foreign investor protections and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system, which promotes job offshoring and allows corporations to sue the U.S. government before tribunals of three corporate lawyers. NAFTA’s investor protections make it less risky and cheaper for U.S. firms to move offshore. Even the pro-NAFTA Cato Institute says ISDS subsidizes offshoring by lowering the risk premium of relocating. Instead of firms facing the cost of risk insurance, they rely on ISDS to make governments in low-wage nations pay them if they think their special NAFTA offshorers’ investor protections aren’t met. U.S. taxpayers not only lose jobs, but our laws, court rulings and government decisions and our Treasury are exposed to reciprocal ISDS attacks by foreign firms operating here. ISDS tribunals can order us to pay corporations unlimited sums, including for their “expected future profits.” Decisions cannot be appealed. More than $371 millions has been paid to corporations after ISDS attacks on the laws North Americans rely on for their health and safety. U.S. trade deals must not subsidize offshoring or threaten our sovereignty: ISDS must be eliminated from NAFTA.

We must also add strong, enforceable labor and environmental standards, not TPP’s weak rules. Since 2007, our trade deals have had labor and environmental standards in their core texts. These terms – also included in TPP – have proved ineffective. NAFTA talks must raise Mexican wages above the current $2 per hour so workers can support their families. The absence of effective wage, labor and environmental standards also incentives U.S. job offshoring and slams U.S. firms and workers with imports subsidized by environmental and social dumping. NAFTA renegotiation must level the playing field by conditioning trade benefits on adoption, implementation and maintenance in domestic law of the rights guaranteed by ILO’s Core Conventions and multilateral environmental treaties nations have signed – and evidence that conditions on the ground have actually improved. Obligations must be subject to the same enforcement and sanctions as all other terms. Benefits must be withdrawn for backsliding.

Imported food, goods and services must meet U.S. consumer and environmental standards. NAFTA requires us to import meat that does not meet U.S. standards and limits border inspection and food labelling. It requires trucks and drivers from Canada and Mexico that don’t meet U.S. standards to have access to all U.S. roads. These terms must be replaced with a simple rule: imported products and services must meet the same standards as domestic ones and all service providers operating here must comply with U.S. environmental, safety, professional qualification, and other laws and regs. And certainly TPP’s limits on financial, e-commerce and other service sector consumer safeguards shouldn’t be added.

We must eliminate the Buy American ban that offshores U.S. tax dollars. NAFTA forbids the use of “Buy American” and similar procurement policies and requirements that firms operating government call centers or other outsourced services employ U.S. workers. Every nation must be free to decide how spends its tax dollars. NAFTA’s procurement chapter should be eliminated.

We must eliminate rules that raise medicine prices. Among NAFTA’s most outrageous special interest terms are those that shield pharmaceutical firms from the market competition that brings down medicine prices for consumers. NAFTA’s existing medicine-price-gouging terms must be eliminated and no new patent or other protectionism for Pharma added.

And finally, we must stop the currency manipulation: All U.S. trade deals must have enforceable punishing consequences for currency manipulation by other countries.

Notice at 2:03, Ross Perot makes reference to factory workers making $13.00/hour in 1992. That’s $22.76 in today’s money or $47,000 a year.

Plus benefits. Paid time off. Pension. A secure retirement. Know how I always say we’re being divided and conquered? All the bullshit, all the left vs right, conservative vs liberal, red vs blue, black vs white, gay vs straight, feminist vs patriarchy — it’s all propaganda to distract us from the war on our economy. It’s not the 1%. It’s the topHUNDREDTH of the top one percent. Did you know that only 2% of Americans make more than $250,000 a year? Only 5% make more than a $100,000 a year. And that’s actually HOUSEHOLDS, not individuals. HALF of all Americans earn less than $30,000 a year! Is $47,000 sounding good to you right now? And how about no student loans? And no student loan payments? Let’s get really REALLY real. We’re being divided and conquered so that we are pitted against each other and too distracted to realize that we are being manipulated, not just by people who are filled with greed for money, but filled with greed for power. Do you really think a $15 an hour minimum wage would be too high? $15 an hour would simply make those at that earning level no longer eligible for subsidized housing, medical and food (SNAP a.k.a. food stamps). It costs what it costs to live. Either the employer pays it or the taxpayer picks up the slack.

One in every four employed people worked in manufacturing in the 1960’s. Today it’s one in ten. We must ask ourselves why our iphones, our laptops, our clothing, our appliances, our cups, our butter dishes, for God’s sake — why are they all made in another country? Union jobs have the greatest pay equity between men and women and people who make more money SPEND MORE MONEY. Take a drive down your nearest main street or go out to the mall. See all those empty storefronts? Yeah. The “recovery.” You want a living wage, workers? Start a union, join a union, and learn about strikes. That is how you get more money in your paycheck. Learn everything you can about how an economy and its people are manipulated through false perceptions of scarcity, the concept and manufacture of “credit,” and the attempt to label time as money when money is really the human attempt to contain and assign value to time. The only way for some people to “make” money without exchanging time is for many others to give time without receiving any money.

Please take a moment to submit your comments to President Trump and his administration asking him to negotiate a trade agreement that benefits all of the American people!

We’ve never gotten the proof of life (proof that Julian Assange is still alive) that we asked for back in November of 2016. The options offered by Wikileaks in this tweeted poll were bad to begin with, but the fact that “video” had the highest number of votes was bizarre. A photograph of a person holding a newspaper printed that same day is the classic proof of life. Why stray from that? And an appearance on the balcony wasn’t even an option. Window appearance was silly – that could be anyone, and videos are alterable as well, especially those filmed against a green screen as the ones he subsequently provided, not the MSM videos, but the ones Julian provided, were. Any footage filmed of Julian where a green screen is being used fails to prove that he is still inside the Embassy and in fact would seem to increase the likelihood that he is no longer there (otherwise, why wouldn’t he just film himself sitting on the usual couch with Embassy Cat crawling all over him?).

Thousands keep demanding Assange proof of life. Not unreasonable. He’s in a tough spot and is WikiLeaks best known validator. Preference?

Julian Assange’s Vault 7 press conference, filmed on March 9, was filmed against a green screen. There was (is) no telling where it took place. And, asked at 18:22 if there is “proof that the CIA is involved in an internal struggle, leaking as opposed to something else?” Julian answers affirmatively — click here to read my full body language and speech analysis of his extremely interesting response.

Then, sure enough, the very next Vault 7 press conference, broadcast via Periscope on March 23, bypassed the green screen issue and any further questions on the actual location from which it was filmed because periscopes are assumed to be live. But there was no video – just the wikileaks logo and the sound of Julian’s voice. But not even his voice was live. It could not have been. There is a blatant skip in the recording at 13:37: the moment he starts talking about the white hats inside the CIA and the internal division that is at the heart of a battle for our very republic (ok, Julian isn’t quite as poetic as I am … fast forward to 13:16 and listen for the blip at 13:37 and then read the transcription below).

If for some reason the periscope is deleted, here is the youtube video. I’ve transcribed Assange’s words below it; start listening at 7:55 and listen for the blip in audio and the complete change of subject at 8:17. (The periscope had a lag time at the start, the videos later uploaded to youtube removed the delay.)

Of course he just happened to have been talking about the internal division at the CIA — again, confirming that he is indeed witnessing internal division within the CIA involving inside leakers, not external hackers. I’ve transcribed his words:

“The Central Intelligence Agency is the largest intelligence agency in the world. Now, it’s an intelligence agen– it’s an organization with tens of thousands of people. Uh, there’s many good people in there. There’s internal divisions about some of the unethical practices, uh, that are being conducted, uh, and every country that wants to be independent and determine it’s own [BLIP IN THE RECORDING] CIA should be uh, broken into a thousand pieces and splintered to the wind because it had become so — it had gotten so out of control.”

He keeps going, commenting that secrecy breeds corruption. I disagree with that — I think corruption causes secrecy, but chicken/egg. That’s an argument for another day. What matters here is that Julian may have originally said something about specific unethical practices or perhaps the 81 elections in other countries that the CIA has attempted to influence, and so that part was edited out. Clearly, he wouldn’t have naturally gone from talking about the sovereignty of nation states to quoting JFK in such a disjointed fashion. Someone (very poorly) edited out a chunk of Julian’s speech and then started the “live” periscope using that audio.

Finally, I was taken aback by some of the remarks made by Assange during an interview conducted by Jeremy Scahill on his podcast, Intercepted, on April 18. Click here to listen to the podcast. Link will open in a new window. Or, read the transcript here.

Now, would you describe a woman who suggested you be executed via drone strike as “charismatic” and someone you’d probably like? Something doesn’t smell right. It’s an excellent interview & there’s a lot to be said for Julian’s sincere admiration of the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and his understanding of press freedoms as protections from the government (negative rights as opposed to positive rights). But any complimentary language regarding Hillary Clinton is a huge red flag.

Note: On my April 16 episode of the Progressive Patriot Radio Show, I analyzed — sentence by sentence — Julian Assange’s voice and speech patterns during his March 9 press conference, when he was asked about whether or not the Vault 7 docs were the result of leaks or hacks, as well as CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s bizarre response a few days later.

The most interesting thing about Vault 7? Nope, not the eavesdropping phone, hackable car, or spying microwave — it was this response from Julian Assange to a question tweeted at him during a virtual press conference.

Is there proof that the CIA is involved in an internal struggle, leaking as opposed to something else?

The video below is embedded to start at exactly 18 minutes and 22 seconds so you can see where he reads the question and “answers” it.

If you’ve read my previous body language/speech pattern analysis posts, you’ll recall the three elements of communication: 1) the words that are coming out of the person’s mouth (i.e. what they’re saying), 2) what they’re really saying, and 3)what they’re specifically not saying or trying not to say or omitting consciously or unconsciously — this third component is sometimes the most revealing.

For the sake of brevity, I’m only going to analyze this one question and the one answer Julian gave on March 9, 2017. I use all caps when a person, in this case Julian, unconsciously emphasizes a certain syllable or word in their speech. These are weak spots, places where their societal mask slips for a second. Julian Assange is unique: he has zero poker face and is a remarkably guile-less person for someone who is so hellbent on exposing the sins of others. This is usually the indicator of a person who really does have nothing to hide and whose motives are sincerely pure. Consider for a moment that before the first dump — I want to say the Bradley, now Chelsea, Manning leaks of the GTMO files and Iraq War logs — he asked the US State Dept to help him redact documents for national security purposes but the State Dept refused to in any way acknowledge Wikileaks as legit — until later, when they were forced to as a part of damage control. It’s very interesting. Many people recoil at the totally uncensored unredacted version of reality that wikileaks presents precisely because most people do have something to hide, or at least something that would make them feel bad or ashamed if it became public. Julian Assange doesn’t — at least his candid, almost childlike inability to self-censor, would lend itself to that conclusion.

(Full disclosure: I was very pleased with the Manning leaks as well as the DNC and Podesta email leaks but thought the CWA leaks were really over the top and unnecessary — and mean. So, I like true whistleblowing not pointless privacy violation.)

Julian reads a question from twitter: “Is there proof that the CIA are involved in internal struggle, leaking as opposed to [he pauses, he furrows his brow, he looks up] something else?”

“Uhhh, while … we can’t comment directly on sourcing [HE NODS HIS HEAD UP AND DOWN — lol], as someone who’s studied the behavior of intelligence agencies for many years in different countries, it is an unusual time in the United States to see an intelligence agency so prominently involved [this is the best – he looks away then quickly back, emphasizing the syllable VOLVED in involved] in domestic politics. Now, as a sort of lev-level of PRINCIPLE, that’s quite problematic. There are arguments on the other side that — obviously — if there’s an extreme … uh, government, uh, then perhaps that does call for … illegal behavior … uh, by an intelligence agency. Uh, we don’t have an opinion uh, on whether or not that is the case. Yet. We’re not the United States. Uh, Wikileaks is, um, in- I guess, in- intellectually inTRIGUED to see this conflict occurring, uh, because it does tend to generATE whistleblowers and sources on both sides of the equation.”

This was an easy one. Assange answered it affirmatively in multiple ways, but I bolded the clearest yes. The question was, is there a struggle? And Julian said Wikileaks see[s] this conflict occurring. But he first answered the question right off the bat by nodding his head repeatedly while saying he can’t comment directly on sourcing. So the words coming out of his mouth were neither a yes nor a no, but his body – his right brain, the truthteller and confessor – wanted the asker of this intellectually intriguing question to know, YES, and you hit the nail on the head! And by the way, not only do we see this conflict occurring, the conflict is generating sources on BOTH sides of the equation.

Note the use of the word source. Now if you saw the recent Comey hearing where the FBI Director confirmed to a member of Congress that it is not illegal for a member of the intel committee (Senators or Representatives on the panel) to lie to the news media the second they walk out of a closed hearing, even though all the other members of congress who were present will know that one of them has lied to the media after the evening news or morning paper comes out, then you know that fake news is LITERALLY fake news on these special occasions.

Comey doesn't want to break our hearts but IT'S NOT A CRIME FOR A SENATOR TO LIE TO WAPO https://t.co/gNEJu4vK3o start 3:22:42, end 3:24:08

AND it’s also not illegal for members of the intel community (those “anonymous officials” cited by the media) to lie to the media. So there are two streams leading to the pool of fake news (two sources): the IC members themselves or the members of congress who are briefed by them (usually under oath — maybe the media should start requiring their sources to swear under oath before accepting the leaks of unsubstantiated unverifiable claims). So when Assange says source, and he’s answering a question about a good vs evil battle within the CIA, and he’s contrasting sources and whistleblowers on both sides, he’s signally (unconsciously) that there are sources who are good and sources who are … not good, and may be providing bad intel for bad reasons.

Now let’s look at part of Julian’s statement more closely:

“It is an unusual time in the United States to see an intelligence agency so prominently involved [he looks away then quickly back, emphasizing the syllable VOLVED in involved] in domestic politics.”

This is a nonstatement on its face: an unusual time? Is there ever a usual time for an intelligence agency to be involved in domestic politics? No. But those are the words coming out of his mouth. But that’s not what he’s *really* saying. He’s really saying two things: 1) that it’s an unusual time in the United States (!), and 2) that he sees AN intelligence agency prominently involved in domestic politics. And notice his interesting eye movement on “involved.” Then close your eyes and listen to that sentence again.

He says it the way you warn a friend who arrives unexpectedly at your front door that the person they’ve been trying to avoid is in your living room RIGHT NOW by mentioning their name out of context while looking in the direction of said living room. “Get it?” Julian is saying. “InVOLVED?!?” For all we know, someone from AN intelligence agency *is* right there in his living room. Which leads me to the next bizarre thing Mr Mumbler says … (sorry, Julian, but sometimes you really do give an amateur speech pattern analyst a run for her money).

“Uh, we don’t have an opinion uh, on whether or not that is the case. Yet. We’re not the United States.” Ok, Julian, we know you’re not the United States. We know Wikileaks is not the United States. So then why does he feel compelled to clarify that, or declare it, as it were? Plus he could have an opinion on a potential battle existing inside the CIA regardless of whether or not Wikileaks is involved with the United States. Now, we can’t really know unless he tells us why but the important thing to notice for our purposes is that he side-eyed on inVOLVED and … hey, everybody, Wikileaks is not the United States. Ok?? So even if they somehow used a macrame invisibility poncho to get into the room with him, he, Julian Assange, is still saying what he wants to say. Ok?? Okey dokey.

Finally, he mentions that he is intellectually inTRIGUED by the conflict inside the CIA, this internal struggle that he is SEEing. That is not (probably) what he intended to say because he probably didn’t mean to confirm that one exists. But we know that when someone answers using the same word (or a synonym) that was used in the question (as with “struggle” and “conflict,”) that they are being generally nonevasive – in other words, if he avoided any use of the word or avoided the topic of internal struggle altogether, it would more likely that he was being untruthful. This was yet another way he answered this question affirmatively.

And notice the word “intrigue” popping out of his mouth to say, “hai hai!” He can’t help but to use and say this word. Why? Because it means collusion, conspiracy or subterfuge. He could have used any word to express how intellectually interested or fascinated he was with the prospect of an internal struggle inside the CIA, a battle between patriots and traitors, warriors & election meddlers. But his truth-teller right brain picked “intrigued”!

Like this:

Strawberry bread! It’s like banana bread — in fact, it’s even made with bananas — but instead of being cloyingly sweet like banana bread, it’s moist, moderately sweet, and chewy because of the delicious dried strawberries. And, if you WANT it to be super sweet, simply use very very brown and ripe bananas, and voila! But that version I would call “strawberry banana bread” versus what this is, strawberry bread that is made with bananas.

If you WANT it to be super sweet, simply make sure the bananas are very very brown and ripe, and voila!

Here is the recipe I originally made, my thoughts, and the feedback I got from my INTJ boss lady (who is of course, a masterful cook herself) and three coworkers. (I’m INFJ — what? You’re 0.0% shocked???)

Ingredients! YES, only FOUR!

INGREDIENTS:

3 yellow (not rotting, zombie, fly-infested, bruised) bananas

3 small or 2 large eggs

1 box of white cake mix

1 4oz package of dried strawberries

DIRECTIONS:

Preheat the oven to 350 F. Mash the bananas till they’re totally disgusting and gooey and look like elephant mucus and then mix the eggs in, until the bowl is filled with an even grosser looking concoction of what definitely resembles bodily fluids. Then pour in the cake mix — just dump it all in otherwise you’ll over mix it and the bread will be tough. Mix thoroughly and add the small bag of dried strawberries and give it a good stir to evenly incorporate the strawberries (if you are not a total brat like some people who get a craving for a certain food and then don’t want to spend extra time on making it, chop the strawberries until they’re minced before stirring them in). Then pour the batter into an ungreased (or, fine, grease it if you want to) loaf pan. Here’s exactly how I baked it and it came out perfectly:

42 minutes — checked it, not set on top

Another 10 minutes — looked good but still too soft when I pushed gently on the top

5 minutes later, knife inserted in the center came out perfectly clean.

My oven is exactly the right temperature so when I make this again, I’ll probably check at 52 minutes and again at 55 with the knife.

After 57 minutes in a 350 degree oven.

INSPIRATION

Now I LOVE pinterest and I love banana bread … but I love strawberries more, and if you know anything about pinterest, you know that it’s very easy to fall down a rabbit hole quickly. One thing leads to another — you’ve gone from banana bread to strawberry banana bread to strawberry pudding to butterscotch pudding to jello to hello dolly in ten seconds and you wonder if you accidentally fell through a Narnia portal into an abyss of non sequiter pins. BUT FEAR NOT — the search bar remembers what you were actually looking for and it’s easy to get back!! So during one of these click-bait adventures, I saw a recipe for “cake mix banana bread” which only required one box of yellow cake mix, 2 large eggs, 3 bananas, stir, pour, bake, etc. I thought, Wow, I hate yellow cake. It’s so gross. I bet that tastes like banana yellow cake. Ick. So I simply moved on, and that’s when I saw a strawberry cake mix recipe – exactly the same additional ingredients, but instead of yellow cake mix, strawberry. Now, again, I’ve had “strawberry” cake mix before and it doesn’t taste like strawberry at all. It tastes … pink. Or like strawberry gum. It’s okay but I wanted the taste of real strawberries. Now, I did see a recipe that called for adding a few tablespoons of strawberry jam to the recipe I modified (so made with yellow cake mix instead of white) and I’m glad I did not add that, because I really liked the taste of the bread I ended up with and so did most everyone who tried it (4 out of 5, including me).

FEEDBACK:

Me: UMMM, I like this, yum. OMG the butter is melting and drizzling off the bread onto my fingers, oh God, this is so good. I think I’ll add half a cup of brown sugar next time.

Me after it cooled completely the next day — without butter: Ummm, this would be really good with lemon curd on it. I love the bites with the dried strawberries — next time I’ll try it with TWO packages of dried strawberries and mince them. (Notice I did not have the same thought about adding brown sugar the next day. Why? Does anyone know why?)

Once I got to work …

Boss: This is good but how ripe were the bananas?

Me: They were yellow – I don’t like them mushy, so it’s more like strawberry bread than strawberry banana bread. (Contemplative pause.) You don’t like it.

Her: I do. I like the dried strawberries.

Me: I don’t like how frozen strawberries turn everything red and I didn’t want pink bread.

Her: Yes, the dried strawberries are a really nice touch.

Me: I couldn’t get the loaf to come out of the pan so I had to bring it with.

Her: Next time let it cool just fifteen minutes before you cut around the sides and it will slide right out.

Her: Actually, it’s exactly right the way it is, plain. It needs nothing. So did you use a cake mix??

Me: Yes! I used a white cake mix instead of yellow, and used dried strawberries instead of frozen.

Her: great idea! I’m amazed that the cake mix tastes so good. I would have thought the old fashioned way would have tasted better — I can’t tell the difference. Wow! Good job!

(Me: speechless I was so glad she liked it — her chocolate cake tastes like it comes fedexed from an enchanted Mayan realm of cocoa bliss through a space-time interruption pipe)

Enter my fellow Millennial who is a self described picky eater:

Her: I really liked the parts where I couldn’t taste the banana.

Me: You couldn’t taste the banana in some parts?

Her: I bit into a chunk of banana and I didn’t like that part but the rest – Sarah – it was good.

Me: You didn’t think you would like it?

Her: No.

Me: You liked the dried strawberries?

Her: Yes.

Me: YAY!!!

(note to self: next time I make it, I will completely blend the batter in the blender or mixer so there are no banana chunks if I’m bringing it to work)

VERDICT: Suave as charged.

Everyone loved the dried strawberries. No one could tell it was made with cake mix instead of the old fashioned way.

Suave. Hipster coworker captured the essence of this recipe. This bread would be a great gift to someone you want to give a unique food present to, such as a teacher or good friend or sister or aunt … it’s the Anthropologie of bread: it seems unusual when taken altogether but each individual part is familiar if you look closely. If you want it to be a comfort food bread, make sure the bananas are all very very ripe and sweet, and you have strawberry banana bread! (And maybe add that fourth a cup of strawberry preserves or jam.)

Final thoughts: This bread would be really nice as a light dessert with butter spread on top along with a glass of rose while enjoying the cool breeze on a summer picnic … in an enchanted strawberry forest. If you make it, I would love to know your thoughts!

If you’re new to the Pizzagate controversy/conspiracy theory, suffice it to say that this blogpost is going to be a very superficial FAQ. In other words, the equivalent of the paragraph synopsis of the course description of Pizzagate 101. Why? Because I don’t feel like writing about these (allegedly) sick sadistic psychopaths and never wanted to muck up my blog with even one reference to their existence … until David Seaman deleted all his videos – ALL OF THEM, EVEN THE ONES THAT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH PIZZAGATE, even his bitcoin/gold sound money, anti-fiat currency videos — off youtube, vidme and vimeo. So who is David and why does that matter? He’s a socially liberal, fiscally libertarian journalist and news analyst who has created at least a video a day since the Podesta emails were released by WikiLeaks in the run-up to election day last year. And he focused heavily on the pizzagate scandal. On the morning of Saturday, Feb 25, 2017, he released a video explaining that he’d taken down his twitter after being ruthlessly trolled by readers of a hit piece that appeared on Buzzfeed news to smear David’s excellent reputation on a multitude of social media platforms. This piece insinuated that David is a liar, and — get this — claims that youtube unfairly allows its broadcasters to reach many viewers with content. Really. David said in this (final?) video that he needed to focus on his health, and that immediately made me think back to Ben Swann, another pizzagate researcher who suddenly stopped creating video content on youtube. Swann posted a cryptic message about “those who know me, trust me” in a pinned tweet before he went completely dark, deleted his twitter, facebook and youtube and DISAPPEARED FROM THE INTERNET. Sure enough, later that day, all of David’s videos were gone too.

So who is Ben Swann? A mainstream media journalist, of all occupations. Ben Swann investigated many controversial topics, such as US involvement in Syria, while at the same time, holding down the desk anchor teleprompter reading night job at a CBS affiliate in Atlanta, GA. And this affiliate was so progressive that they allowed him to research and deliver a “Reality Check” segment once a week where he could present the facts on a unique subject of his choice, and one week in January of 2017, that unique subject was pizzagate. Now the original video was deleted, but as you know, the internet is forever. Here it is:

If you didn’t have time to watch it, the gist of it is this: while there are no mentions of any child sex trafficking ring, or even pedophilia, in the WikiLeaks emails between super lobbyist John Podesta and many other people, there are multiple references to what may or may not be a code language that refers to children in a sexualized way, and there are multiple references to Comet Ping Pong pizza (whose slogan is Play Eat Drink – yeah, PED), which is owned by James Alefantis (who has a surname that was made up at some point in the last 100 years — verify that for yourself here through Ancestry’s name search tool, then try a normal not made up last name, for example, Reynolds or Thomas, and you will see a legit last name that goes back hundreds of years, as a family name should). Now, James has an instagram, handle @jimmycomet, with so many photos so disturbing that Ben Swann declares them unfit for broadcast on television. Yes, the nightly news that regularly shows images of war, robbery, shooting, fighting and death — that nightly news. These instagram images posted by the owner of Comet Ping Pong Pizza are too disturbing to be broadcast at 6:00 pm. On the news. I’m only going to embed one in this blog post because it’s so fucking fucked up but this little girl is the reason I’m going to start making videos on Pizzagate.

Click on the photo to read a more detailed blog post on the pizzagate scandal

Ben also talked about the 2007 FBI document that shows which symbols correspond to which type of predator’s preference, and notes that Besta Pizza (2 doors down from Comet Ping Pong) has a logo that has one of these pedophilia symbols right in the middle of the logo. And as soon as this interesting detail made the rounds on the internet, Besta changed their logo to remove the symbol. Just a coincidence? Please. And bizarre violent art (with images of decapitated people) “decorates” the wall of this “family friendly” restaurant. And a band called “Sex Stains” with the same symbol that was removed from the Besta Pizza logo in their videos regularly performs live at Comet Pizza.

So all Ben called for in this particular Reality Check was an investigation; he closes the segment with, “the big question here is why hasn’t any investigation taken place?” Days later he was gone. Disappeared from youtube and all other social media (his Wikipedia page is still up, however, unlike David Seaman’s).

Now, Ben didn’t even scratch the surface (and he uses that exact phrase) due to the constraints of television, and one of the most crucial details he didn’t mention is all the times that foods that are known code words used to refer to children are mentioned in the Podesta Emails. It’s bleak – just too fucking horrifying for words. But David DID. He fearlessly and tirelessly provided updates and correctly predicted, based on a tip from a source he referred to as being within the intelligence community, that a major arrest would happen in the next 24 hours the day before convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky’s son Jeffrey was arrested for the same thing. David knows his stuff, and if you’re familiar with the Goliath story, you know how this will end. (David, please come back to twitter as soon as you can … everyone else, please donate to his patreon in case he is in need of a lawyer or just a vacation from all the darkness and horror.)

If you are searching for more answers or details, a Pizzagate 202, so to speak, a youtuber named Marty Leeds made this video he calls a Pizzagate Primer. It’s over an hour long but it is by far the best compilation of all the clues and references to known euphemisms so far.

(Update from 2018, Marty Leeds’ channel was terminated by YouTube. Luckily a different channel has uploaded the video so you can watch it here:)

FINALLY, take heart. Law enforcement is on it. Watch this DHS public service announcement. The camera pauses on the neon PIZZA sign while telling us, the viewer, “The signs are everywhere. Sometimes you just have to take a second look!”

The situation is well in hand; it is most likely a matter of time, patience, and building a bulletproof case. FBI Director Comey stood up to Donald Rumsfeld years ago, back when Comey was acting Attorney General, regarding continuing an unsavory, likely unconstitutional, special access program at Guantanamo during the Bush/Cheney regime. This is not a man who is afraid of the elite or their “circle of friends” or any other VIP’s who talk about flying in thousands of dollars worth of pizza and hotdogs from Chicago for everyone to enjoy or who email each other about which would be better, playing dominoes on cheese or pasta. And our complete set of balls president, President Donald Trump, publicly declared on Feb 23, 2017 that all the child traffickers are to be rounded up and arrested, that his goal is to end human trafficking. So watch that PSA again. Because the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI are telling us something in this brief spot: the signs are everywhere.

Staggering 1,500 + arrests in one short month; compare that to less than 400 sex trafficking-related arrests in 2014 according to the FBI. https://t.co/zHWtw3zXUe

Join me live at 10 PM central time every Sunday night on Blog Talk Radio for more. And guard your heart! Darkness feeds off hate. Law enforcement needs our faith in them and our desire for justice to be served. And so do those children.